Around 1496, still in his twenties, Dürer began work on an ambitious project: illustrating, cutting, printing, and financing an entire picture book of the Book of Revelation, without a publisher standing between him and the market ^[3]. The first edition, issued in both German and Latin in 1498, was a commercial success, and it made him wealthy enough on his return to Nuremberg to be treated as something close to a member of the city's merchant elite, the Ehrbaren ^[3]. Dürer used the typeset and, quite possibly, the presses of the Nuremberg printer Anton Koberger, and he borrowed the German translation of the biblical text from Koberger's own 1493 Bible ^[3]. The Adoration of the Lamb is generally placed among the earliest plates completed for the series, likely begun around 1496 ^[4].

Dürer did not invent his iconography from nothing. The core of nearly every woodcut in the series can be traced to the influential Cologne Bible, published by Wilhelm Quentell in 1479 and republished in Nuremberg by Koberger in 1483, and to the Strasbourg Bible issued by Johann Reinhard de Grüninger in 1485 ^[3]. What Dürer changed was not the basic cast of scenes but their force: contemporaries and later generations found the results so overwhelming that, according to one survey of Northern painting, the strength of Dürer's statement discouraged other artists from attempting the subject again for several centuries ^[4]. The series has a structural symmetry of its own, divided around the wisdom of the sealed book of the lamb on one side and the unfolding struggle against Satan on the other, with the eighth of the fourteen woodcuts, John Devouring the Book, forming the series' pivot ^[2].

The Apocalypse appeared as the year 1500 approached, a date many Europeans associated with the Last Judgment, and the book's popularity owed a great deal to that anxiety ^[2]. E. H. Gombrich argued that no work of art before it had visualised the terrifying visions of doomsday, and the signs and portents said to precede it, with comparable force and power, and that Dürer's imagination fed directly on the general unrest with Church institutions that was building in Germany toward the end of the Middle Ages, unrest that would break out openly in Luther's Reformation less than two decades later ^[1]. The woodcuts' popularity has also been read against the broader millennial pattern of European history, in which multiples of the year 1000, 500, 1000, 1500, carried this kind of eschatological weight ^[3].